Israel and Lebanon both want to dislodge Hizbullah

In washington on April 14th Lebanon’s ambassador and her Israeli counterpart met for the first official direct talks between the two countries in decades. Such a meeting would have been unthinkable only weeks ago. Until recently in Lebanon, negotiating with Israel was tantamount to treason. But even as the two sides talked, Israel continued to pummel southern Lebanon. In the past six weeks Israeli air strikes have killed over 2,000 people and forced over a million to leave their homes. The talks may have been momentous but they are only a start.

Only days before, on April 8th, shortly after Donald Trump announced a ceasefire with Iran, Israel launched air strikes on Beirut and other parts of Lebanon that killed at least 357 people, many of them civilians. In Lebanon people are calling it Black Wednesday. The Israel Defence Forces (idf) claims the targets were Hizbullah members. Many Lebanese look at the bulldozing of border villages and the deaths of civilians and fear a fate similar to that of Gaza. The attacks drew wide international condemnation and a rare rebuke from Mr Trump, who in a call told Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to “low-key” the attacks. Israel has since refrained from strikes on Beirut but America has backed its refusal to accept a truce.

Israel’s military leaders are clear that there is only so much they can do against Hizbullah. On April 3rd an Israeli general got into hot water with the politicians and residents of the north when he told journalists that fully disarming the group would be impossible without “occupying all of Lebanon” and that Israel’s war aims there should be more “humble”. Humility is an unfamiliar concept to Israel’s hard-right government.

Before the talks, Mr Netanyahu had demanded that the Lebanese government present a comprehensive plan for disarming Hizbullah and for establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries. Lebanon had little hope of offering that. It wants a truce without such preconditions. It called for Israel’s withdrawal from the south, the return of Lebanese prisoners and no de facto security zones.

Afterwards, Israeli officials were cautiously optimistic. “The important thing is that we now have a shared interest with the Lebanese: to decouple what happens between us from our conflict with Iran.” But neither side expects quick results. “Negotiations might be arduous and may take lots of time,” said one Lebanese minister.

Decommissioning Hizbullah’s arsenal and forcing the group to accept the disbanding of its military wing would take years. It would require a political consensus for such a shift within Lebanon’s deeply fractured society and the building up of the capacity of the Lebanese army. Even if such a shift were possible, Mr Netanyahu is unlikely to give them the necessary time. Meanwhile, Hizbullah’s leaders and their Iranian backers have in recent days made thinly veiled threats of a coup against the government in Beirut, should Lebanon’s rulers try to disband it.

Like Iran, Hizbullah has suffered far more militarily than its foe, but it is still able to menace Israel. As one Israeli official put it, “their main advantage is that they are prepared to pay much higher prices than us” because their survival is at stake. Israeli commanders in the field say they have been surprised at the willingness of its fighters to join the battle.

One worry is that Hizbullah’s leadership has been so hollowed out by Israeli attacks that those left are, in the words of Mark Daou, a Lebanese mp, “just the retirees from the security apparatus”. The fear is that real authority rests in Tehran. Mustafa Fahs, a Shia analyst, says bluntly: “You can only take Hizbullah’s weapons with one thing: a fatwa from Iran.”

And yet the prize for Lebanon of taking on Hizbullah would be grand. A political deal might attract regional support, end the fiction of the militia as the core of Lebanon’s defence strategy and force Lebanon’s leaders to deal with the group’s arms. “The game-changer,” says Mr Daou, “is if you no longer allow Hizbullah to function, not just disarm it.” Degraded and politically isolated, the group may have no better moment to accept terms. The question is whether its sponsors in Iran permit it. ■